Not applicable
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed broadly relates to the field of computers computing, and more particularly relates to the menu items in the field of graphical user interfaces.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are many reasons why the World-Wide-Web (Web) has become very popular, ranging from the ease of being able to have access to more information, companies can reach a lot of people (customers), and the user-friendliness of today""s browsers, and there is efficiency in regards to time. A feature known as hypertext allows a user to access information from one Web page to another by simply pointing (using a pointing device such as a mouse) at the hypertext and clicking. One other important feature of the Web is its ability to process information in remote web pages without the requirement of having a specialized application program for each kind of content accessed. Thus, the same content is viewed across different platforms.
Despite many efficiencies of the Web, there are many areas for improvement. Web service providers are always looking for ways to improve their performance. Waiting in general to access web pages and database can be very frustrating. The quickest way to return information to the end-user is by keeping the information in a memory xe2x80x9ccachexe2x80x9d, as opposed to accessing it from disk or from a database. A xe2x80x9ccachexe2x80x9d is a special type of internal high-speed memory to store both instructions and data. Whenever the central processor needs to access memory, it will first look in the cache. If the data is found in the cache, the data is read much faster, and this is known as a xe2x80x9ccache hitxe2x80x9d. If the data is not found in the cache, the processor must then access the slower external memory, which is known as a xe2x80x9ccache missxe2x80x9d.
Although caching is useful, there is still a problem in determining what information should be kept in cache. Resources can be limited on a Web server that must support millions of hits a month. Keeping information in cache that won""t benefit the general public or most valuable customers would be wasteful. If the web service provider decides it will keep the most commonly accessed information in cache, this will cause another problem of determining what information is most popular. A web service does not typically have this information readily available. The nature of this xe2x80x9cmost popularxe2x80x9d information is dynamic. Therefore, a need exists for a method and system to overcome this problem.
Many times the users of Web information want to understand which information is most popular. For example, a user performing a query against an online database such as electronic yellow page directory listings may want to see what the most popular listings are based on user access for a restaurant, a car dealership, a movie theater or some other criteria. The publishers of these databases examine database traffic and other files to determine which lists are the most popular based on user access. Today, this listing is static, that is, the publishers do not have a method or apparatus to update these pages automatically. In order to keep these lists updated, many times the publishers or providers of these online databases must manually update the most popular page headings. Accordingly, a need exists for an automatic method to enable publishers and providers of online database information to automatically provide users the list of the most popular data.
Briefly, in accordance with the present invention, a method to serve web pages from a server linked to a network of a plurality of clients, the server coupled to a plurality of data pages and to an access log. The method comprising the steps of: reading the access log to collect data identifying pages that are most frequently accessed by the clients; storing the one or pages in a cache as identified by the access log; receiving an access request for one or more clients for a page; determining whether the request is for the page is stored in the cache; retrieving the requested the page from the cache when the page is found; transmitting the page to one or more clients requesting access.; and a list of the pages most frequently accessed by the clients from the access log is presents to the clients. This provides clients feedback with the most popular pages based on a specific request.
In accordance with another embodiment of the present invention, an information processing system and computer readable storage medium is disclosed for carrying out the above method.